Star Trek Beyond: 5 Ups And 3 Downs (The Science Edition)

1. The Warp Bubble

Unfortunately, many party pooper physicists have put the kibosh on the possibility of ever achieving FTL travel, for trivial reasons like, "It abhors the laws of physics," and "It completely demolishes Relativity" or something. Pah.

So FTL is impossible if you like your spacetime linear, but the warp drive circumvents this by bending spacetime back in on itself in the Trek universe. Picture it like an ant trying to get from one end of a sheet of paper to the other. It can either travel along the paper, which would take a long time, or it can roll it into a tube and simple cross that part where the two ends meet, cutting out the middle man.

One effect of warping spacetime, however, is that it can have a lot of horrible relativistic time dilation-y effects, so the FTL ships in Trek are wrapped in a warp bubble of normal spacetime to prevent this. Another effect of this is that it can tend to make spacetime look a little, well, warped.

In Beyond, we were treated to a glimpse of the Enterprise travelling through subspace whilst cocooned in this bubble. In the real world, we have gravitational lensing which is, for all intents and purposes, the same thing. An object with a gravitational field powerful enough can bend spacetime around it so much that it can also cause the light from objects behind it to bend around it, creating a lens effect.

Unfortunately, the bubble can have some pretty disastrous effects of its own (namely, destroying whole star systems), but we'll give them a pass because gravitational lensing and warp bubbles are exciting.